2022 was the year that I finally got a lot of stuff archived, filling in gaps at The Internet Archive.

• Blast Thru
• Casual Combo Collection
• Caterpillar Construction Tycoon
• Canada Hunt
• Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover 2003
• Cribbage Quest (blog post)
• Crossword Mania 2
• Dance With ABC
• Dear America: Friend To Friend
• Deep Sea Explorer
• Disney’s Hot Shots: Cub Chase (blog post)
• The EEX Files: Eek! Strava Ganza
• eGames Galaxy of Sports
• Enemies From Space
• Everest
• Every Child A Reader
• F/A-18 Precision Strike Fighter
• Film Fatale
• First Phonics
• The Game Of Komando City
• Games 4 Girls
• Football Manager
• The Fox & The Pussy Cat
• Fraction Operations
• Galactic Bowling
• GapKids Adventure (blog post)
• Goldilocks Gamebook
• Graphers
• Gravity Angels Part 4: Death Force
• Hawaii High: The Mystery of the Tiki
• Herbert and the Underwater Pyramid
• Hidden & Dangerous
• Hollywood Pets
• How Do You Spell Adventure?
• Hunchback Of Notre Dame (blog post)
• Jesus Wants All Of Me: Interactive CD-ROM
• Journey’s End
• JSF: Joint Strike Fighter
• Jubilee’s Journey: A Jane Goodall Interactive Adventure
• Jungle Rangers: The Quest Begins
• Jungle Rangers: Into The Canopy
• Kudos
• King Solomon’s Trivia Challenge Volume I: Quizmaster Edition
• Kid’s Arcade Pack For Windows
• Kristi Yamaguchi Fantasy Ice Skating
• Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver — Quest For Melchiah (Smart Saver Release)
• Looney Tunes: Back In Action Movie Trailer CD-ROM
• Mia’s Science Adventure: Romaine’s New Hat
• Micro Scooter Challenge
• Tsunami First Wave Game Pack

For a long time, I have resolved to get my collection archived at the Internet Archive. It’s going to be a big task. Better to get started sooner than later.

• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Carnival (Taco Bell Kids Meal Promo) (blog post)
• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Lost Island (Taco Bell Kids Meal Promo) (blog post)
• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Space (Taco Bell Kids Meal Promo) (blog post)
• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Wild West (Taco Bell Kids Meal Promo) (blog post)
• Adventures With Kangaroddy: The Journey To Snow Mountain
• The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain (blog post)
• The Adventures of Mr. Tickle
• Animal Genius
• Arty the Part-Time Astronaut
• Astro Assembler (blog post)
• Barbie Adventure: Riding Club
• Baseball Mogul 2007
• Big Science Comics
• Bikini Beach Stunt Racer (blog post)
• Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest
• Brain Quest 2nd Grade
• Brainiversity
• Build City (blog post)
• Burger Island Combo

I finally got around the archiving the various Dreamcast Magazine demo discs (at least the US versions). If you care about the technical details of how I accomplished this, I have written up the details over on my programming blog.

These are various sampler/demo discs that were released for the Sega Dreamcast in the North American market. There were 2 Generator discs and 10 Magazine discs, labeled volumes 2 through 11 (apparently, the first issue of the Dreamcast Magazine did not come with a disc). Many of these could already be found in collections at the Internet Archive. The innovation I am trying to provide is to allow access to the individual assets by making available ZIP files of the CD-ROM and extended GD-ROM data areas, as well as any audio tracks in each region. These are difficult to examine with the standard opaque rips.

Dreamcast Generator Discs:

• Dreamcast Generator Volume 1
• Dreamcast Generator Volume 2

Dreamcast Magazine Discs:

• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 2
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 3
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 4
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 5
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 6
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 7
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 8
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 9
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 10
• Dreamcast Magazine Volume 11

A long time ago, I acquired a set of 6 DOS shareware CD-ROMs from a company called White Wolf Software:

Click for larger image

Eventually, I wondered if I could find some more and I purchased a lot of them on eBay that contained 16 more. At first, I thought maybe they were periodical, but I noticed that they were all published in 1995. Each disc contains 10 different shareware titles. According to the above photo, they used to ask a fairly high price (US$13). It’s unlikely that these discs have any software that isn’t represented elsewhere on the Archive. I think the most interesting thing about these discs is the amount of graphic design effort that went into the cover art. Also, pay particular attention to the cover of #29: Commander Keen IV— I strongly suspect that the youngster represented on the cover was the child of someone involved in the production of the disc series.

At long last, I finally got around to extracting the ISO-9660 filesystems, scanning all the cover art artifacts, and uploading them to the Internet Archive. If you are interested, click through the link to see which 10 programs are on each CD-ROM. I spent a lot of effort to document the contents of each distro, linking to MobyGames when the program is a game that is represented in the database.

Also, the reason I had put off the final uploading was because I still needed to scan all of the cover art artifacts (CD-ROMs and jewel case matter), and then straighten and crop each scan. This latter step is the most tedious. I finally got around to creating a new tool specifically to accelerate this process called MobyCAIRO. Hopefully, it will help reduce the friction for future submissions.

• Series 4
• Series 5
• Series 6
• Series 7
• Series 9
• Series 11
• Series 13
• Series 15
• Series 16
• Series 17
• Series 18
• Series 20
• Series 21
• Series 22
• Series 23
• Series 24
• Series 25
• Series 28
• Series 29
• Series 30
• Series 34
• Series 36

Including the Series 3 disc already on the Archive, there are 23 discs of the series uploaded. There are at least 36 total.

Other Items
A few other items I have tossed up on the archive recently:

• NAMCO 2004 Marketing Kit: This is a video DVD and a CD-ROM. After I finally got this uploaded, I realized there was another copy up on the Archive already. That contributor even went through the bother of scanning each of the marketing cards in the kit, even through they are represented on the CD-ROM as PDFs.
• Starbright Athsma CD-ROM Game: Quest for the Code: I covered this a long time ago on this blog (one of the last times I played a game and wrote it up for this blog).

Last decade, I started up the Acquisition Log portion of this blog. I realized that while I might not have time to document all the stuff I acquire, I at least wanted to make sure the search engines picked up some record that these old discs still exist. As time marches on, I might have one of the last known copies of certain titles and I needed to make at least a little mark on the historical record.

Well, 2020 is the year that I’m finally starting to archive stuff. To that end, I’m systematically working through items and uploading them to the Internet Archive. Here is my page at the Internet Archive.

Product Catalogs
I realized I had accumulated a lot of product catalogs. A lot of them seem to be from around the year 2000, for some reason. Due to my recent enthusiasm for submitting promo art to MobyGames, I scanned them, cropped them up, and submitted the individual pages to the database. Then, I packaged the scans into a PDF and uploaded them to the Internet Archive. The ingest process is rather amazing– it runs optical character recognition (OCR) over all the pages and makes various versions available.

Here are the catalogs I have scanned recently:

• Neo-Geo: Bigger Badder Better: For my first foray into IA uploading, I sent this odd advertisement magazine that I posted a long time ago on this blog.
• SSI Catalog 1996-1997
• Electronic Arts PC Entertainment Catalog 2000
• LucasArts Winter 1999/2000 Product Catalog
• Philips CD-i Product Catalog, circa 1992: This didn’t explicitly list any dates, aside from having a few “Coming Attractions Fall 92” sections.
• Eidos Interactive Product Catalog, circa 2000: Again, no publication dates, but all of the games in the catalog were published no later than 2000.

CD-ROM
I also got my feet wet with uploading CD-ROM ISO images, starting with the Ubisoft Product Catalog 2004-2005 CD-ROM, the one described in this post. The interesting thing that the Archive allows concerning ISO files is to be able to dig in directly via web browser, i.e., the “View Contents” option (here is the “View Contents” for this particular disc). This allows you to inspect or download individual items without having to download the entire disc image, which can be hundreds of megabytes or even several gigabytes large.

While the Internet Archive serves a valuable role, it can’t be denied that YouTube is more convenient for serving video to the masses. To that end, I am also making playlists of the videos found on these discs. Here is the YouTube playlist of trailers and other videos found on the Ubisoft Product Catalog disc.

Future Directions
I am finally making an effort to systematically extract the contents of the thousands of optical discs that I own (up to about 250 discs reliably ripped as of this writing). I will be filling gaps in the Archive as necessary.

I have some video game promo video DVDs to preserve at the Archive and YouTube. I am still working on determining an optimal method for doing this.

Further, I have tons of printed material to scan. The speed of the raw scanning process is bound by the speed of the scanner hardware. However, the speed of the post-processing is heavily human-bound. To that end, I am working on some new computer programs to help me with the tedious, manual processes for getting the scans ready for presentation.